Well, I do think with “great power comes great responsibility” – and I think it is a nice feat to keep big shareholders at bay, for two reasons: I think those who know best should make decisions, rather than some detached and possibly un(der)educated greedy morons; often, those ‘institutional investors’ want to maximize profit only, that’s it. Again, often this is unethical (killing off natural and human resources along the way) and stupid and backwards, instead of helping mankind as a whole to advance by stimulating invention: this is – what I think – what Google’s hidden agenda is: stir up the market with some cool stuff (Gmail, Gdocs, Android, …), democratize information (Gmaps, GEarth, GBooks, …) and technology (AppEngine) and force the whole industry to move along and step up to the plate: or why else you think did Yahoo/Microsoft improve their webmail, maps, etc. Besides, I do not see Google seriously competing in the market anyway: the moment they seem too lose, they do not force their competition out of the way, but either simply buy them (YouTube vs. Google Video, and more recently Omnisio) or leave them alone and happy (Facebook v. Orkut); and why should they: everybody there has enough money already and just wants to have a good time: Sergey and Larry keep the google machine as a hoppy, putting new technology out there and move on to newer stuff – nothing wrong with that, is it?

I don’t think a company should spend one dime of my money doing nice things. Those are distractions and irrelevant to the task of killing their competitors. I don’t care about charities, feel good crap, donations, etc. At best all of it is marketing to make you believe the company cares. At worst it is a major defocus and creates potentially massive inefficiences.

Btw, killing competitors is in fact what companies are supposed to do. The companies that pursue that objective are the companies that I want to put my money into. Leaving competitors wounded and angry is a very stupid thing to do.